Crime and Punishment in Upper Canada provides genealogists and social historians with context and tools to understand the criminal justice system and locate sources on criminal activity and its consequences for the Upper Canada period (17911841) of Ontarios history.

Illustrative examples further aid researchers in this era of the provinces past, which is notoriously difficult to investigate due to paucity of records and indexes. An entertaining, educational read, the book features chapters with detailed inventories of available records in federal, provincial, and local repositories; published transcripts and indexes; online transcripts and indices; and suggestions for additional reading.

Also included are engravings (jails and courthouses, public hangings, judges), maps (showing the boundaries of districts), charts (for statistics such as frequencies of different kinds of offences), and document examples (court minutes, jail registers, newspaper reports, et cetera), while case studies demonstrate the use and relevance of various records.

Janice Nickerson provided behind-the-scenes research for the CBC Television program Who Do You Think You Are?, published the books Women and Property in a Nineteenth-Century Ontario County and Ethnic Identity Among the Nineteenth-Century Descendants of Hudson's Bay Company Fur Traders, and has authored three how-to guides and numerous articles on genealogical subjects. She lives in Toronto.

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Crime and Punishment in Upper Canada: A Researcher's Guide (Genealogist's Reference Shelf) is a must-have for any serious genealogist or anyone struggling to find an ancestor in early Ontario.

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